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The field of organization development is about change and development of organizational systems. One of the major barriers to system change is organizational silence, the fear of lower level to speak truth to power, and senior leaders' reluctance to seek the truth. Consequently, senior leaders whose role is to orchestrate strategic change that will develop the organization's capabilities do not know the whole truth about their system's capabilities to achieve its purpose and strategy and live to its values. Thirty years of enabling leaders to transform their organization through safe honest, collective, and internally public conversations using a structured process called the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) has led to insights about why such conversations are powerfully transformative. After a brief description of the SFP, this chapter describes insights and supporting grounded data about why honest conversations were transformative when leaders fully embrace the practice and spirit of SFP. These insights were gained from facilitating and observing hundreds of honest conversations in progress. The findings have implications for how leaders aided by consultants can accelerate strategic change that will improve effectiveness and performance while simultaneously transforming trust and commitment.

In 2007, the authors conducted a case study of 13 teachers across seven elementary schools. We learned that, due to pressures of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002) and state mandated testing, these schools were akin to reading academies—focused chiefly on the teaching of reading skills. They promised to share their results with local administrators and teachers, initiating the reconsideration of elementary social studies. To this end, they revisited school sites, revealed their findings, and offered to “fit into” ongoing discussions of curricular change. They attempted to engage teachers in courageous conversations, or honest, frank appraisal of current conditions. Eventually, they talked with approximately 100 K-6 teachers, principals, and district administrators. Framing their inquiry in Giddens (1984) theory of structuration, they present their efforts to build collaborative relationships in three cases of narrative inquiry. They follow it with dilemmas and insights for the field organized into five considerations: courageous conversation, curricular control, integration, social studies advocacy, and courting schools.

Since the demise of Delivering Race Equality strategy in 2010 under the last Labour government and with the Coalition (2010–2015), and now the Conservative government at times have adopted a “color blind” approach to race and health. This raises the fundamental question why is race equality off the political agenda and how black mental health issues can be part of a future strategy. The 2015 Care Quality Commission (CQC) annual monitoring report of the Mental Health Act (MHA; which has also incorporated the learning since the inception of the Act in 1985) further highlighted the overrepresentation of African and Caribbean men and women who are sectioned in secure wards or on Community Treatment Order (CTO) in the psychiatric system over the last 30 years. The CQC have revised the code of practice which recognizes issues around race equality as part of wider perspectives and principles of human rights.

In October 2017, the government established an independent review of the 2007 MHA as a way of providing more safeguards for patients and service users. The review, under the leadership of Sir Simon Wessely which is reported in 2018, provided an opportunity for an informed public debate on the historical and contemporary roles of psychiatry and the experiences of mental health in Britain’s African and Caribbean communities. The review did examine community anxieties about the proportionally larger numbers of black ethnic minorities receiving inpatient care and CTOs, or in the criminal justice system. However, after 30 years of Black History Month in the UK, we still need to ask the question: Are those of African descent overrepresented in these systems? If so, is serious mental illness over diagnosed among these groups due to the persistence of stereotypes rooted in the experiences of slavery, or do they in fact experience distinctive patterns of mental health and illness, perhaps due to the wider fallout of historical enslavem

This chapter presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes actionable the ideas of Lewin and systems theorists. Its features are three organizational outcomes that must be achieved simultaneously, features of the system that must be targeted for change, six silent barriers to change, a governance system for continuous learning, change in large complex systems, and elements of a system that needed to immunize it against ultimate destruction.

The field of organization development is fragmented and lacks a coherent and integrated theory and method for developing an effective organization. A 20-year action research program led to the development and evaluation of the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) – a platform by which senior leaders, with the help of consultants, can have an honest, collective, and public conversation about their organization's alignment with espoused strategy and values. The research has identified a syndrome of six silent barriers to effectiveness and a dynamic theory of organizational effectiveness. Empirical evidence from the 20-year study demonstrates that SFP always enables truth to speak to power safely, and in a majority of cases enables senior teams to transform silent barriers into strengths, realign their organization's design and strategic management process with strategy and values, and in a few cases employ SFP as an ongoing learning and governance process. Implications for organization and leadership development and corporate governance are discussed.

A wider participation from outside the top management team can support the strategy creation and execution of firms through improving access to knowledge, increasing innovativeness and creating legitimacy for the strategy. However, creating a climate of trust where ideas are freely expressed and challenged is easier said than done. This paper thus focuses on trust in strategizing, in particular in strategy workshops with wider participation.

The analysis is based on qualitative data from 10 strategy-making processes consisting of a total of 28 strategy workshops. Data were collected through interviews and joint reflections with the leaders, external facilitators and consultants, as well as through action research.

This study identifies three factors that influence trust in strategy workshops with wider participation, namely opening up the conversation, clarity of the participative process and delivering with honest intent. These factors could play crucial roles in creating the trust needed for wider participation in strategy workshops.

This paper provides strategy actors (e.g. leaders, consultants) with actionable knowledge about what strategy workshops with a wider circle of participants require to create trust.

This study relates to the ongoing and increased interest in openness for strategy-as-practice in general and open strategy in particular. Moreover, it contributes to the discussion that the boundaries between strategizing and change tend to become blurry. Therefore, the present paper contributes to the theory and practice of strategy creation, strategy execution and change by investigating wider participation in strategy workshops.

To explore human resource (HR) practitioner perspectives of the effectiveness, challenges, and aspirations of the performance management (PM) system to inform future directions for PM design and success.

Interviews with 53 HR practitioners from a cross-section of organisations operating in the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand.

Practitioner's discussed the criticality of effective conversations across all elements of the PM system. Using an interpretive approach, and through a lens of social exchange theory (SET), we used their voice to develop a conversations-based PM model. This model centres on effective performance conversations through the design and implementation of the PM system. It includes four enablers and five environmental elements. The enablers (aligned goals, frequent feedback, skills development, and formality) depend on skilled interactions and conversations, and the organisational environmental elements (design, development function, buy-in, culture, and linkage to other systems) are enhanced when effective conversations take place.

Practitioners can use the conversations model to help shape the way they design and implement PM systems, that place emphasis on upskilling participants to engage in both formal and informal honest conversations to build competency in the enablers and assess organisational readiness in terms of the environmental elements.

By listening to the under-utilised voice of the HR practitioner, and through a lens of SET, we developed a PM model which emphasises reciprocity and relationship building as key tenets of the PM system. While past research recognises the importance of effective conversations for PM implementation, it has largely silent been about the role of conversations in system design. Our model centres these conversations, presenting enablers and environmental elements to facilitate their core position within effective PM.

In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

This chapter describes the change efforts and action research projects at a Dutch multinational which, over a period of 25 years, produced in one of its businesses a zigzag path toward collaborative leadership dynamics at the horizontal and vertical interfaces. The chapter also identifies the learning mechanisms that helped achieve this transformation. Changing the patterns at the vertical interfaces proved to be a most tricky, complex, and confusing operation. The data show that organizations need hierarchical interfaces between levels, but are hindered by the hierarchical leadership dynamics at these interfaces. The data furthermore show that competitive performance requires more than redesigning horizontal interfaces. A business can only respond with speed and flexibility to threats and opportunities in the external environment when the leadership dynamics at agility-critical vertical interfaces are also changed.

Purpose: Death is a universal inevitability of life, though parents and adults often report difficulty or concerns about discussing the topic with children. This investigation reports on how parents of very young children (ages 3–6) have or would discuss death with their child, and what parents consider in navigating such discussions.

Methodology: In-depth interviews were conducted with parents (N = 24) of very young children (ages 3–6) to develop a grounded theory of parents actual and anticipated approaches to discussing death with children.

Findings: Parents generally described either seeking to protect children’s “innocence” by avoiding or limiting conversations of death, or, seeking to promote children’s socioemotional competence in confronting the complexities of death through more extensive discussions. We identified four factors we hypothesize may influence parents intended strategies for navigating these approaches: (1) parents’ past and current experiences related to death, (2) children’s exposure to deaths, (3) cultural and personal beliefs about death, and (4) parents’ knowledge and awareness of their child’s cognitive competences. While protection of children’s “innocence” and cultivation of children’s socioemotional competences are not opposing goals, these concepts appeared to be situated on a continuum.

Originality/Value: Given the prevalence of death in contemporary media, and an ongoing global pandemic, young children’s exposure to death will remain heightened for the foreseeable future. Family scholars and practitioners would be wise to prepare to assist families and children thoughtfully and compassionately. We further explore tools, resources, and strategies parents and professionals have found helpful in navigating these discussions.